Prof Sophie Ratcliffe

I was born in London and studied English at Cambridge, before coming to Oxford for Doctoral and Post Doctoral work. Much of my research focuses on the nineteenth-century but my research interests, and my teaching, extend into the twentieth, and twenty-first century literature, and I enjoy working with undergraduates and graduates in all these areas.

I’m interested in ideas of emotion, the history of how we feel, and how books shape feelings, and this is what drove my first book On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). I am currently working on a number of projects.
 

Readership

My work in this area focuses on questions of readership and aesthetic encounters in the nineteenth century and today. You can read some of my essays on this subject here and here.

The Medical Humanities

My research in this area takes two forms – I am writing a book about reading and medicine in the nineteenth century, called Reading Well. I also co-lead workshops for those working in the NHS.

Writing and Emotion

My first book examined the writing of Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, and Geoffrey Hill I continue to publish on these writers, and to think about the idea of what it means to feel – running the spectrum from ideas of envy to questions of comedy (I edited the letters of P. G. Wodehouse in 2011).

Contemporary Writing

I regularly review fiction and non-fiction for the national press, and was a judge for the 2016 Baillie Prize, and I am currently writing a book. You can read some of my reviews here, here and here.

You will find me teaching, lecturing and supervising on authors including Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Browning, Braddon, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce. Samuel Beckett, W. H. Auden. Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, Martin Amis, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. I also teach Paper 1 – a paper about the way in which we approach language and literary texts.

Courses:

English Language and Literature

English and Modern Languages

Classics and English